The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (4 page)

It was Jesse Jackson who once remarked to me, “If you say something I can’t understand, that’s a failure of
your
education, not mine,” and he was right. No
sloppy thinker or lazy rhetorician himself, Jackson knows the intellectual effort it takes to understand an idea so well that one can explain it to the learned and the layman alike. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time and place for every academic language under the sun—and for the jargons, obscurantisms, esoterica, dialects, glosses, and inside meanings that attend their path. But there is also the need to write and speak clearly about important matters for the masses of folk who will never make it to class.

There is in the academy today something akin to hip-hop’s vexing quest for the rapper who can “keep it real,” that is, the rapper who best matches his lyrics with a life of crime or ghetto glory, depending on which version of reality wins the day. Many academics are caught up in trying to prove who’s more authentic, who’s more academically hard core, who’s the realest smart person around. That usually ends up being the scholar who is most “rigorous,” and in academic circles that’s often the thinker who is least accessible or who eschews “public” scholarship. But these debates break down on their own logic: academics and scholars who are rigorous don’t have to do work that panders to the mainstream in order to be effective (after all, devoted students can carry their former professors, or their work, with them to the State Department or to
Newsweek
). Work that can be widely understood or that is relevant to current affairs shouldn’t be automatically suspect or seen as second rate. As Jackson understood, our failure to make our work accessible may be as much the fault of intellectuals as it is the problem of a dumbed-down society.

These are the beliefs that guide my vision of the intellectual—the American intellectual, the black intellectual, the engaged intellectual, the public intellectual (and in a way, aren’t all of us intellecuals in the academy
public
intellectuals, since universities are among the biggest public spheres in the country?). Relieving suffering, reinforcing struggle, and rendering service are not bad ways to live the life of the mind.

Although I have yet to write a memoir, I have at times written about
my life as it relates to my work. I do this, in part, because I believe that
intellectuals and academics who have been poor or working class must
testify to our experiences and struggles, and perhaps inspire others to
emulate, even exceed, our efforts. I also find that the personal voice,
when its tones rise above grating narcissism, can emphasize truths that
sound needlessly abstract in the academic’s mouth. When enough of
these stories get out, perhaps folk who, on first blush, might seem unlikely
to succeed in higher education will get a fair chance.

Michael, let’s talk a little about your self-perception. I’ve seen articles describing you as an intellectual giant, a person who has created a rather unique niche, as having one foot in the scholarly world and the other “on the block,” and somehow synthesizing the two. When I’ve seen you, you’ve been very vocal in your opinions on issues or themes outside of yourself. But the little I’ve heard about you as a man, a person . . . how did you pull this off? That “raising up from the bootstraps” thing is cool, but where we’re from, a lot of us have had to do that. Yet you are special and unique and obviously on a distinct path that, on the one hand, you’re carving, but on the other, seems like it was laid out there for you. How did you have the good sense to follow it, to take that dive? How’d you do that?

There’s no question that nobody is self-made in America. All this mythology of the rugged individual has to be deconstructed. We’ve got to get at the heart of the
essential lie that America was founded on this ethic of personal and private individual achievement. That has to be scrapped because a form of American Protestant communalism is the basis of discourse about American democracy. Recent studies in American political history evince a strong philosophical disagreement with the underlying principles of this American mythology—that we came here as solo artists and that we developed as individuals articulating ourselves against the wilderness of the collective. That’s really not the case. People are produced by cultures and communities, by larger networks of association, love, kin, affection, and so on. And the same is true for me. I was produced, first of all, in the womb of a family that loved me, with my mother and father in the house. My father adopted me when I was two years old. I called him daddy because I didn’t know any other man in my life. He was my daddy and my father. I’m one of five boys who grew up together in our immediate family. There were four older brothers and sisters, all of whom now are deceased.

When were you born?

October 23, 1958. Being born in what we would call the ghetto of Detroit had a decisive influence on my life and an impact on how I understand the relationship between scholarship and the street, between the world of the mind and the world of concrete outside of the academy. I think being born in the ghetto and being reared there, and dealing with the inner-city black community, connected me to other African American people who were doing extraordinarily important things. Detroit was a vibrant, vital black world teeming with possibility beyond the ballyhooed violence that stalked poor and working-class blacks. It was a wonderfully rich experience seeing black folk who lived meaningful lives, who ran their own businesses, and who eventually ran the city. When I was still in my teens, Coleman Young was elected the first black mayor of Detroit. I encountered in the political landscape powerful figures like Kenneth Cockrel, a Marxist black lawyer who was very important in my own rhetorical development, especially the stylistic etiquette of joining black radical discourse to a powerful social criticism of the forces of oppression. My pastor, Dr. Frederick Sampson, came to my church when I was twelve years old. He was the decisive intellectual influence in my life, with his fusion in his rhetorical repertoire of metaphysical poetry, racial uplift, and classical learning. Another pastor, Dr. Charles Adams, also thrilled us with his brilliant preaching and his exploration of the radical social implications of the Bible and theology. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. James, was extraordinarily important in my understanding of black people. She taught us about black history when folks didn’t want to hear that, even other black teachers at Wingert Elementary School, which I attended from kindergarten through sixth grade. My Sunday school teachers in church appreciated black history and black culture and exposed us to the broad outlines of our people’s sojourn in America, which gave us a sense of somebodyness as black children. It wasn’t done so much by my teachers deploying a formal didacticism or a pedagogy geared toward instilling pride, but as they took for granted that black folk could achieve and love each other. That had a huge influence on me. They gave us a sense of helping ourselves while not harming others. We could love ourselves without hating anyone else, including white brothers and sisters. It wasn’t about them, it was about us. They taught us to take for granted the existence of a black universe rooted in a black psychic infrastructure that had no need to pay deference to white culture, embracing all folk while defending black humanity and interests in the face of inimical forces.

That was the kind of world in which I was reared. This framework of existential and spiritual nurture provided a rich background for me—Sampson with this attention to the spiritual needs of African American people, Cockrel with his black Marxist discourse, Adams with this attention to the social ramifications of the gospel, and Mrs. James with her attention to the need for black history and memory as a resource to stabilize the black present and to secure the black future. They were among the folk who gave me a sense of self, who helped to create Michael Eric Dyson, who helped me understand the different bricks that must be laid at the foundation of my head and heart in order to have a healthy identity. So, I didn’t spring fully formed out of some racial Zeus’s head; I was shaped and molded in an environment where black achievement was taken for granted, where black excellence was expected, where black aspiration was crucial, and where black intellectual engagement was the norm of the day—on every level. And I’m not primarily referring to formal education in school. I’m referring largely to everyday life with brothers and sisters who were playing the numbers and playing the dozens. They were trying to use their linguistic and rhetorical capacity to defend their interests and worldviews.

That’s just what I was going to ask, if you had that duality even then, where on the one hand, you were already processing what you were being given, and exposed to from your elders, but I was thinking—what were you doing with the fellas on the street, your peers? That’s what you’re talking about.

Oh yeah. There was at least a duality going on. I felt I belonged to many worlds. I kicked it with the fellas on the street and spent a lot of time engaging the Motown curriculum: Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and so on. And at the same time, I learned to engage Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and other great figures. Those interests didn’t develop automatically, but were encouraged by teachers like Mrs. James, who wanted to make sure we knew about Jan Metzeliger and the shoe-lacing machine; Deadwood Dick and Wild Bill Pickett and the hidden tradition of black cowboys; Garrett T. Morgan and the invention of the traffic signal; Daniel Hale Williams and open heart surgery; Charles Drew and blood plasma; and Elijah McCoy and the lubricating cup. Her interest in black life was contagious. At Webber Junior High School, I
was fortunate to encounter teachers who were instrumental in my further development. My seventh-grade English teacher, Mr. Burdette, enhanced my speaking skills by encouraging me to become involved in oratorical contests sponsored by the Detroit Optimist Club. And Mrs. Click taught me to type quickly and accurately, and besides that, gave me tremendous affection as a growing young man who had a huge crush on her. To tell the truth, I had crushes on many of my female teachers, starting with Mrs. Jefferson in kindergarten, to Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Williams at Webber, and Mrs. Ray and Mrs. Carter at Northwestern, almost all of them English teachers. In my mind, love, language, and learning were profoundly linked in what may be termed an erotics of epistemology.

When I got to Northwestern High School, I had a crush on yet another teacher, Madame Black, who taught me French and so much more. She gave me a sense of my burgeoning intellectual power and encouraged me to tutor other students in French. She also gave me a sense that I should use language as a doorway into further investigation of American and African American culture. So did her husband, Dr. Cordell Black, whom I perceived then as my friendly competition! Dr. Black was a professor at Oakland University who often came to pick up Madame Black after school, and I’d still be there, and he’d see me trying to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s masterly philosophical tome,
L’etre et le neant,
in its original French, a book that, in English, translates to
Being and Nothingness.
He’d laugh a laugh of wonder and encouragement and say, “Look at him, look at his aspiration and ambition.” But most important, he also encouraged me to read Du Bois and Fanon and other classics in black letters. These figures gave important direction to my scholarly inclinations.

But I can’t romanticize things. At the same time, there was quite a bit of pain and conflict going on as well. There was the pain of being called by some of my peers “brainiac,” “Poindexter,” and “Professor.” Of course, it was their way of slyly, sometimes harshly, complimenting what they thought of as my smarts. But recognition and resentment were, in that beautiful phrase of Ralph Bunche’s, “inexorably concomitant.” To be sure, there was also a hierarchy of virtues established, one that comedian Chris Rock refers to when he jokes in a routine that black folk who get out of prison get much more “dap,” or respect, from other blacks than those who’ve just graduated with a master’s degree from college. I faced a version of that phenomenon, something that is termed in pedagogical theory as “rival epistemologies,” or competing schemes of understanding how the world operates and the place of knowledge and formal training in its orbit. Some blacks think you can’t be simultaneously cool and smart, at least in the sense of formal education. But I also experienced strong support in my peer group. Some of my peers said, “This brother’s destined for a different world than we are.” Others said, “He’s in the ghetto, he’s with us, but he’s got something different. We don’t always understand it, we tease him about it, but we admire him too.” Some of my male peers—I’m thinking especially of a young man named Michael Squirewell—sought to protect me from some of the worst elements in our neighborhood. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen as often today as it did then.

I grew up in Detroit during the restructuring of the automobile industry. My father worked at Kelsey-Hayes Wheelbrake, and Drum Company, which I call his alma mater, a place where I “matriculated” as well between the ages of nineteen and twenty. I didn’t go to college until I was twenty-one years old. I had been a teen father, lived on welfare, and hustled several years before furthering my formal education. I had gotten off track from the enabling tradition and heritage handed on to me by my teachers. I had gone to Cranbrook, one of the most highly esteemed private schools in the country, located in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. I was dating a young lady from my church, whose father, Damon Keith, was a deacon there, as well as a federal judge and one of the city’s most prominent citizens. Judge Keith arranged for me to take the IQ and entry exams, and when I scored well, I was admitted, even though I couldn’t afford the $11,000 annual tuition, which was damned near my father’s yearly salary. Judge Keith arranged for me to receive a partial scholarship from New Detroit, a local civic and leadership organization, and to work for the other part of my tuition by traveling the forty or so miles from what was then the second richest suburb in the country to one of the bleakest neighborhoods in America, on the East Side of Detroit, to fill bags with food items, and to do maintenance work, for a group that aided the poor, Operation Hope, run by Bernard Parker. Two of Judge Keith’s daughters, including the young lady I dated, attended Kingswood, the female complement to the all-boys Cranbrook. The schools have since merged.

I went to Cranbrook—where I agreed to repeat the eleventh grade in order to get sufficient academic grounding and to get at least two years at this prestigious institution under my belt, with an eye to getting into a quality college or university—and in some ways, I had a tremendous experience, and in other ways, it was a very painful one. I was seventeen years old, and I had never gone to school with white kids before. Now here I was going to school with kids who were extremely rich, many of them the sons and daughters of some of the wealthiest parents in the country. I remember, for instance, doing a report with Bill Taubman, the son of Alfred Taubman, one of the richest men in the nation. I was also the classmate of an heir apparent to Rockwell International, and the half-brother, Robert Zimmerman, of director Steven Spielberg. And at Kingswood, where we sometimes took classes, things were no different, and I remember Ford Motor Company head Lee Iaccoca’s daughter, Kathy, was a student at the time. When I got out to Cranbrook, which rested on over three hundred acres of verdant, prosperous geography, nestled in a city of extraordinary material blessing, I felt like the Jimmy Stewart character in Hitchcock’s
Vertigo.
My head began to spin.